I've been publishing international rankings (men and women) since 1997 at http://home.sprynet.com/~ronkessler/rankings.htm . On the men's side, my rankings have kicked FIFA's butt - study can be found at http://home.sprynet.com/~ronkessler/rnkstudy.htm . I know these have not been updated for awhile (sorry, turbulent personal life) but you get the idea. I also use an iterative system where each team's rating is adjusted based on what an average team would be expected to get against their opposition. 50 iterations are generally enough to bring the ratings to equilibrium but I run it to 100 to be sure. I also developed an offense and defense rating system using the same algorithm. Since two parameters are being measured, it reaches a double equilibrium - with the solution alternating on each iteration. The numbers are close enough though to just pick one. One can use these to predict outright scores in matches, but I have not published them yet.
This thread's been mentioned in another forum, so I'd like to revive it. Voros, do you have a spreadsheet or script or anything that you ran to generate the rankings? (It seems like you did, given your Brazil-Anguilla experiment.) And if so, would you mind if I were to take a look at it and try plugging in various combinations of including/excluding matches?
I too would like to see your current rankings, to see how the USA and Mexico are doing compared to FIFA's.